what's going on here?

NTB

Diamond Member
Mar 26, 2001
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For the last couple of weeks - really, since I built my new system - I've noticed that nearly every time I try to play a game, the video locks up, and then I either lose the signal, or it blinks and then comes back, with the following error message:

VPU Recover has reset your graphics accelerator as it was no longer responding to graphics driver commands. Please tell ATI technologies about this.

so I can click either "send" or "don't send", and then I get this:

VPU Recover was unable to fully recover from a hardware deadlock, and has switched to software rendering. To resotre hardware rendering, you must restart your computer. Do you want to restart your computer now?

Any ideas why this would happen? It doesn't have to be a 3D game either; it just did it when I tried to play an old copy of Sim City 2000. Here are the system specs, if they'll help:

AMD Athlon 64 3000+
1GB (2x512) PC3200 @ PC2700 speed - board downclocked when I added the second stick
Chaintech VNF3-250 mainboard
ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB video card

Nathan
 

NTB

Diamond Member
Mar 26, 2001
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bump...still trying to figure this out. Works fine when I'm doing normal stuff - word, excel, IE; I've even been working in JBuilder all weekend without a problem. But if I try to fire up a game (3D or not), the video just locks up, then either dies or comes back in software-rendered mode.

Nate
 

tennesota

Lifer
Aug 9, 2000
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I ran into similar problems with a VisionTek Xtasy 9600 XT a few months ago. I tried different video drivers from both VisionTek and ATI, tried different power supplies, placed it in different mobos...I just could not get it to play nice.

The only similarity I see between your rig and what I was running is the use of an AMD Athlon64 3000+ processor. My processor is a ADA3200AEP5AP
 

DAPUNISHER

Super Moderator CPU Forum Mod and Elite Member
Super Moderator
Aug 22, 2001
29,804
25,368
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If you eliminate heat and drivers as culprits, then go into the bios and disable 8x AGP and fastwrites and enable vid ram caching if the option is present. If it still isn't stable then you can use drivercleaner to nuke the drivers then reboot in safe mode and install the drivers from there.
 

NTB

Diamond Member
Mar 26, 2001
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lets see...where to start...

1) I've tried 2 different driver versions (latest two from ATI), with the same results - blinking / flickering in the lower left part of the screen and graphics corruption.

2)locked AGP at 4x, disabled FW & SBA, one at a time, all with identical results.

3) ran dxdiag - all direct draw / direct 3D tests passed without locking up, but I did see corruption in some of the tests: bands of color on what should have been only black and white in the first directdraw test, and flickering colors (mostly red) on the cube in D3D tests. The cube should only be black or dark gray with a green X in the middle, correct?

So far, no dice. it still locks up on anything much more complicated than MS word :p . Anybody else have a suggestion? I'm going to open the case and see if I can tell whether or not the fan is working.

EDIT: Fan is working, but the heatsink on there is still very warm, even under just a normal windows load.

Nathan
 

NTB

Diamond Member
Mar 26, 2001
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I think I fixed it! Just for curiosity's sake, I tried a different power connector on a different lead than the one it was originally hooked to; this one (other than the card) only goes to the floppy drive and the fan on the back of the case. So far, everything seems to work - tried a few games, including the two that I *knew* were locking it up, and they worked beautifully :)

Nathan